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Tuesday, October 02, 2018

Toward an Analytical Understanding of Unconditional Love

Unconditional Love, Pattern Appreciation and Pareto-Optimal EmpathyOne of the ways we have been thinking about the "Loving AI" project, in which we are using the Sophia robot and other robotic or animated agents as meditation and consciousness guides for humans, is as "creating AIs with unconditional love toward humans."Having AIs or robots help humans through meditation and consciousness-expansion exercises, is something that is being explored in that project as a step toward more ambitious examples of deeply, widely loving robots and AIs.

(The Sophia robot demonstrating some of her consciousness-expansion chops on stage at the Science and Nonduality conference in 2017...)

But what is "unconditional love", really?Like "consciousness" itself, it is
something that no two people involved in the project think about the same
way.Refining and interpenetrating our
various conceptions of these ideas, is part of the fun and reward of being
involved in a project of this nature.

Thinking about it practically, if some other being loves me
unconditionally in the abstract, that is somewhat nice to know, but doesn't
necessarily do me much good or even make me feel much better.Many times in my life, someone has done
really annoying things to/for me out of good intentions and even love --
because they felt love toward me but didn't really understand me hardly at
all.A general feeling of love toward
me isn't really enough to be helpful -- what's needed is love coupled with
understanding.

This brings us beyond unconditional love, though, to what
one might call unconditional or universal empathy.Which is the main topic I want to talk about
here -- in a moderately rambling and musing sort of way....

I will model unconditional love as the combination of two
factors: universal empathy, and the goal of maximizing the world's
well-being.

I will argue there are practical limits on the scope of
empathy, due to the complexity of the underlying processes involved with
empathizing; and I will introduce the notion of Pareto-optimal empathy as a way
of thinking about the closest we can come to universal empathy within a domain
where bounded resources are a reality.

Foundationally, I will suggest, all these concepts derive
from the basic phenomenon of "pattern appreciation" (a term due to
David Hanson).That is: a universally
empathic agent is one that can recognize all patterns; and a unconditionally
loving agent is one that has a goal of encouraging and enabling all patterns to
get extended.In resource-constrained
situations, agents can only recognize some patterns not all, and extension of
some patterns constrains extension of other patterns -- so one gets
complexities such as Pareto-optimal empathy.Simple, primitive underlying pattern dynamics are manifested in the
context of persistent entities and "beings" (which can themselves be
viewed as certain sorts of patterns) as empathy and love.Unconditional love, in this analysis, is
basically the maximally ethical behavior according to the "pattern
ethics" outlined in my 2006 book The
Hidden Pattern.

Universal or
Broad-Scope Empathy as a Multi-Objective Optimization Problem

A bit prosaically, one can think about the goal of
“empathizing with all beings”, or the goal of "empathizing with all
humans", as a multi-objective optimization problem.

A multi-objective optimization problem is the problem of
maximizing or minimizing a SET of functions, without necessarily specifying
which of the functions is more important than which other one, or placing
weights on the functions....For
instance, in mate selection, a woman might want a man who is funny, handsome
and wealthy.She might not know which
of these she values more, let alone be able to weight the different qualities
numerically.But she would know that:
given constant amounts of funniness and handsomeness, more wealth is better;
given constant amounts of funniness and wealth, more handsomeness is better;
and given constant amounts of handsomeness and wealth, more funniness is
better.Here we have a 3-objective
optimization problem.

Modeling unconditional empathy as a multi-objective
optimization problem, one consider that for each being X in the universe,
“empathize with X” is a goal….

We don't have a solid, precise definition of
"empathy", but I think the basic concept is clear.When X empathizes with Y, there is an aspect
of X (at least in some sub-module of X) experiencing what Y has experienced, in
the sense of experiencing some analogue of what Y has experienced.This analogue is generally supposed to
inherit the key emotional aspects of Y's experience.And the possession of this analogous
experience generally enables X to predict some things about Y's cognitive or
behavioral reaction to their experience.

From Empathy to Love

Commonly it occurs that when X empathizes with Y, then if Y
is experiencing a bad situation in some way, X will then do something aimed at
improving Y's condition.But I don't
think this is best considered as part and parcel of empathy itself.As I'm thinking about it, a purely passive
being could still be empathic. This
ties in with why I consider unconditional or universal empathy, as only one
part of "unconditional love."

Clearly, an empathic being with a goal of improving the
well-being of the world, will tend to do helpful things for the beings with
which it empathizes.But I find it
conceptually cleaner to consider "having a goal of improving the
well-being of the world" to be a separate quality for "having
empathy."

This ties in with the related point that having a goal of improving the well-being of
the world, does NOT imply actually being able to usefully improve the
well-being of the world.For a world
effectively model-able as being full of experiencing minds, empathy is critical
for a well-intentioned mind to actually be capable of improving the well-being
of the (minds in the) world.

Unconditional love, I suggest, can be effectively thought of
as the combination of universal empathy with the goal of improving the world's
well-being.Having only universal
empathy, one could simply stand by and co-experience the world-suffering, even
if one had the power to do something about it.Having only the goal of improving the world without an understanding of
the world, one will just make a mess, because one will lack a deep resonant
connection to the things one is trying to improve.Putting them together, one has the desire to
help each of the beings in the world, and the understanding to know what
helping each of those beings really means.

Arguably Buber's concept of an I-Thou relationship contains
both of these ingredients: empathy and the desire for improvement of
well-being.In Buber's terms, unconditional
love is basically the same as having an I-Thou relationship with
everything.But here I am aiming to
formulate things in a somewhat more scientifically analytical vein than was
Buber's style.

Another framing would involve the concept of a high-quality
scientific theory as I outlined in my book "Chaotic Logic" back in
1994.One thing I noted there is that
a high-quality theory displays significant mutual information between the
particulars within the theory, and the particulars of the phenomenon being
explained.Empathy in the sense
described here also requires this -- this is a different way of looking at the
idea of a "suitably analogous experience" ... one can think about
"an experience with a high degree of mutual information with the
experience being empathized with".One can perhaps look at unconditional love as: the goal of universal
well-being, combined with high-quality theories about how to realize this goal.

This may seem overly strict as a conception of unconditional
love -- one may want a definition in which, say, an extremely loving dog should
be validly considered as unconditionally loving of all beings, even if it can't
empathize with most of the things that are important to most beings.But I don't think this extremely accepting
definition of unconditional love is the most interesting one.Love without understanding is limited in
nature, because the lover does not even know what they're loving.

This sort of distinction has been explored in romantic
fiction many times: Imagine a beautiful and intellectual teenage girl, with one
suitor who loves her for her good heart and beauty, and another who loves those
things but also fully appreciates her unique intellect, her love of poetry and
mathematics, etc.We would say the
latter suitor loves her more completely because he understands more of
her.The former suitor does love her,
but he really only loves part of her because the other part is incomprehensible
to him.

Pattern Appreciation as the Deep Foundation of
Empathy and Love

Another, deeper way of looking at the matter is to focus on
patterns rather than "beings."A "being", in the sense of a persistently identified entity
like an object, mind or "agent", is in the end a specific sort of
pattern (existing as a pattern relative to some abstract observer, where an
abstract observer can be quantified e.g. as a measure of simplicity and an
applicative operator).Framing empathy
and love in terms of persistent beings is natural in the context of human life
and culture, yet not as foundational as framing them in terms of pure
elementary pattern dynamics.

Consider the goal of pursuing extension and expansion and
synergy-with-other-patterns for all patterns in the universe (obviously a
rather complex multi-objective optimization problem, since given limited
resources what extends one pattern may constrain another).In this view, empathy has to do with how
many patterns one perceives.In order
to meaningfully "pursue" extension/expansion/synergy of pattern P as
a goal, an agent (or other pattern) must perceive and identify pattern P.Someone who is not empathic with mind Y,
simply is not able to perceive or understand many of the key patterns in Y's
mind.So the key point here is: What an
agent can really pursue is the combination of

extension/expansion/synergy for all known
patterns in the universe

expanding the scope of patterns known

But of course the methodology an agent can follow for
expanding the scope of patterns it knows, will be constrained and guided by the
patterns it knows.So "unconditional
pattern-level love" would consist of knowing all patterns in the universe
and pursuing extension and expansion and synergy for all of them.Deficiencies in pattern recognition, such as
deficiencies in empathy, would constrain an agent to a lesser degree of pattern-level
love.

A Quantitative
Question

This collection of perspectives on the concept of empathy
allows us to analyze empathy in a computational sense (without making any
commitment about what model of computation to assume, e.g. primitive recursive
versus Turing versus hyper-Turing, etc.).For a being X to have empathy for a being Y in the sense articulated above,
it is clear that X must be capable of running processes that are, in an
appropriate sense, analogous to Y's processes.

There is a quantitative question lurking here: If Y uses
amount r of resources in having a certain experience, how much resources must X
necessarily utilize in order to have a closely enough analogous experience to
Y's to validly be "empathizing with" Y?

So, for instance, imagine a little old lady who noticed the
desire of my 13 year old self to own a personal computer (back when I was 13
these were extremely novel devices), and felt kindly toward me and bought me a radio
(since it was cheaper than a computer and was also a wizzy electronic device).This lady would have been empathizing with
me, in a sense -- but poorly.I wanted
the computer so I could experiment with computer programming.It was a desire to program that was
possessing me, not a desire to own gadgets (I did like experimenting with
electronics, but for that a standard radio wouldn't have been much use
either).Her ability to experience
something analogous to my experience was limited, due to her inadequate model
of me -- she experienced vicariously my desire for a gadget, but didn't
experience vicariously my desire to be able to teach myself programming.Corresponding with her poor model of me, her
ability to predict what I would do with that computer (or radio) was limited.

This example illustrates the fuzziness of empathy, and also
the need for reasonably close modeling in order to have a high enough degree of
empathy to actually be useful to the entity being empathized with.

To rigorously answer
this quantitative question would require greater formalization of the empathy
concept than I'm going to give here.It
would require us to formalize the "analogous" mapping between X's and
Y's experience, presumably using morphisms between appropriately defined
categories (e.g. graph categories involving X's and Y's states).It would require us to formalize the type of
prediction involved in X's predictions of Y's states and behaviors, and the
error measures to be used, etc.Once
all this is done, though, it is pretty clear that the answer will not be, say,
log(r).It's pretty clear that to
empathize with an experience of a system Y in a useful way, generally will
require an amount of resources vaguely on the order of those that Y critically
utilizes in having that experience.

(This being a blog
post, I'm casually leaping past some large technical points in my
argument.But this shouldn't be
interpreted as a minimization of the value of actually working out details like
this.A well-worked-out mathematical
theory of empathy would be a great thing to have. One could use the reduction of empathy and
love to pattern appreciation to create a quantitative formalization of these
ideas, but there would be a lot of "arbitrary" looking choices to
make ... reference computing models to assume, parameters to set ... and
studying how these assumptions affect the quantitative aspect mentioned above
would take a bit of careful thought.But
I don't have time to think through and write out all the details of such a
thing now, so I'm making some reasonable assumptions about what the
consequences of such a theory will be like, and proceeding on with the rest of
my intuitive train of thought.....)

The Practical Difficulty
of Universal Empathy

It immediately follows from this quasi-formalization of
empathy that, for a system with finite
resources, empathizing (with non-trivial effectiveness) with all possible beings
X will not be achievable.

Of course "all possible beings" is stronger than
needed.What about just empathizing
with all beings in the actual universe we live in?(Setting aside the minor issue of defining
what this universe is....)

In principle, an entity that was much more mentally powerful
than all other beings in the universe could possess empathy for all other
beings in the universe.

But for entities that are at most moderately powerful
relative to the complexity and diversity of other entities in the universe, empathizing
with all other entities in the universe will not be possible.To put it simply: Eventually the brain of the
empathizing entity will fill up, and it won’t be able to contain the knowledge
needed to effectively empathize with additional entities in a reasonable
time-frame.

Pareto-Optimal
Empathy

We can then think about a notion such as “Pareto-optimal
empathy” ….

A Pareto optimum of a multi-objective optimization problem,
is a solution that can't be slightly tweaked to improve its performance on one
of the objectives, without harming its performance on one or more of the other
objectives.

In the example of a woman looking for a funny, handsome and
wealthy man, suppose she is considering a vast array of possible men, so that
for any candidate man M she considers, there are other men out there who are
similar to M, but vary from M in one respect or another -- slightly richer, a
lot taller, a bit less intelligent, slightly more or less funny, etc.Then a man M would be a Pareto optimum for
her if, for all the other men M' out there,

if M' is more handsome than M, then M' is less
funny or less wealthy than M

if M' is funnier than M, then M' is less
handsome or less wealthy than M

if M' is wealthier than M, then M' is less funny
or less handsome than M

What Pareto optimality says is that, for all men M' in the available
universe, if they are better than M in one regard, they are worse than M in
some other regard.

What is interesting is that there may be more than one
Pareto-optimal man out there for this woman (according to her particular
judgments of funniness, handsomeness and wealth).The different Pareto-optimal men would
embody different balances between the three factors.The set of all the Pareto-optimal men is
what's called the woman's "Pareto front."

Getting back to empathy, then, the basic idea would be: An
agent is Pareto-optimally empathic if there would be no way to increase their
degree of empathy for any being X in the universe, without decreasing their
degree of empathy for some other being Y in the universe.

There would then be a “Pareto front” of Pareto-optimally
empathic agents, embodying a diversity of choices regarding whom to empathize
with more.

To be sure, not many humans occupy spaces anywhere near this
Pareto front.The limitations on human
empathy in current and historical society are generally quite different ones;
they are not generally the ones imposed strictly by the computational resources
of the human brain and body.Nearly all
humans could empathize much more deeply and broadly than they do, without
improving or bypassing their hardware.

The Pareto-optimal empathy concept applies on the underlying
pattern level as well.Given limited
resources, every known pattern can't be concurrently urged to extend,expand and synergize without conflicts
occurring.Further every pattern in
the universe can't be recognized by the same finite system -- the inductive
biasing that allows an agent to recognize one pattern, may prevent it from
recognizing another (related to the "no free lunch theorem").Finite-resource systems that recognize and
create patterns can exercise broad-scope pattern-level love via pattern
appreciation and active pattern enhancement, but unconditional pattern-love
needs infinite resources.

Increasing Empathy By
Expanding Capacity

A missing ingredient in the discussion so far is the
possibility for an agent to expand its capacity, so as to be able to empathize
with more things (either becoming infinite, or becoming a bigger finite
agent).An infinite entity can,
potentially, empathize with all other entities (whose size are finite or are
some sufficiently lower order of infinity than the entity) completely, without
compromise.A finite entity that
assimilated enough of the universe's mass-energy could potentially make itself
powerful enough to empathize with every other entity in the universe.

An agent may then face a question of how much of its finite
resources to devote to expanding its capacity, versus how much to achieving
Pareto-optimal empathy given its current resources.But we can incorporate this into the
optimization framework by defining one of the multiple goals of the agent to be:
Maximizing the total expected empathy felt toward agent X, over the entire
future.In this way, the possibility is
embraced that the best way to maximize empathy over all time is to first focus
on expanding empathic capacity and then on maximizing current empathy, rather
than to immediately focus on maximizing current empathy…

The closest one can come to unconditional love as an
individual agent, then, short of breaking out of the mode of being in which
finite resources are a reality, is something like: Pareto-optimal empathy, plus
the goal of increasing the world's well-being.Those of us who aspire to some form of unconditional love as an abstract
conceptual ideal, would do well to keep this more specific formulation in mind.Though I have no doubt many of the specifics
can be improved.

Unconditional
Eurycosmic Love

From the underlying patternist view, "expanding
capacity" is mostly about where the boundaries around a system are
drawn.Drawing them around an
individual physical entity like a person, robot or software system ... or the
Global Brain of the biological and electronic systems on the Earth ... one
faces finite-resources issues.Considering the pattern-system of the whole universe, one concludes that
the universe as a whole recognizes all the patterns that exist in it and, to
some extent, fosters their extension and expansion and synergy.But still, one pattern's growth constrains
that of another.

To get to truly unconditional pattern-level love, one has to
go to the level of the multi-multi-...-multi-verse, which I've called the
Y-verse or the Eurycosm ... here
all possibilities exist, along with all possible weightings of all
possibilities.Everything is open to
grow and expand and synergize freely.Individual universes are created within this broader space by delineating
rules, structures and dynamics that create resource constraints, thus limiting
the direct existence of unconditional love, but opening up possibilities for
increase in the degree of approximation to unconditional love within the given
constraints.

In Sum

“Unconditional empathy” and "unconditional love"
are the province of beings much larger in capacity than the beings they are
empathizing with …

... but Pareto-optimal empathy gives a way of thinking about
empathy that is “as unconditional as possible given the empathizing mind’s
constraints”

… and that incorporates the process and possibility of a
mind overcoming its (perceived or actual, depending on one's perspective)
constraints....

And so to approximate unconditional love in a situation of
constrained resources: Aim to contribute to the world's well-being, and aim to
position your balance of empathies (averaged appropriately over expected
futures) somewhere on the Pareto front.

At the underlying, foundational level, love and empathy are
about patterns recognizing other patterns and encouraging them to extend,
expand and synergize.Pattern growth
can be considered to occur unfettered in a sufficiently broadly defined sort of
multiverse, but in a universe like our physical or cultural worlds or our
individual minds, there are resource constraints, so that unconditional love
and empathy can be increasingly approximated but not fully achieved within
these boundaries.

10 comments:

The optimization of empathy, Pareto or otherwise, requires the complete annihilation of the self which cherishes itself; this wisdom has never been born . . .

I told you about the homicide victim I found underneath the bayou bridge in Houston, Texas, back on December 13, 2013 (a Friday). Well, almost a year after coming to Los Angeles, early fall of 2015, I found a dead junkie (overdose) under an abandoned RR bridge not far from the bridge I live under; I smelled him! Then this last week, a Hispanic girl, a street sweeper working downtown who I run into occasionally while collecting recyclables, told me about this empathically optimized individual who was using a ball-bat to club homeless men to death while they slept – no, it had zero effect on my sleep routine. I just found it rather bizarre, this guy being from Houston, coming to L. A. – his family had no idea why he would do so, and killing homeless men while they slept; I just wondered if, perhaps, this bona fide death angel was looking for me! So this last Friday, as usual, I go downtown, pick up recyclables, come back to my bridge via 7th street, and stop at the river to bathe. When I get under the 7th street viaduct I see this white dude lying flat on his back on the concrete; he looked rather peaceful so I just thought he was some junkie who had nodded out – not an uncommon sight to see, what with this place being populated by bona fide freaking ANGELS. Of course I get closer and see that he’s D-E-A-D, dead! Eyes wide open, dried out, and vacant; mouth open with a stream of dried blood running from its corner to the ground; back of head caved in and mushy appearing . . . ah, yes, a blunt-force trauma homicide!

So anyway, I’m talking to this LAPD officer and upon finding out that I moved here from Houston, he asks, “So how does L. A. compare to Houston?” So I let him know, and I was brutally honest. At first he was chuckling but then he became a bit defensive; he told me that the people (angels) here in L. A. like to think they take the compassionate approach. “Compassionate to whom,” I ask, “the business owner whose business is surrounded by 150 junkies living in tents, shooting up dope, shitting, and pissing all over his sidewalk?” They give these junkies everything they need – and then some, to maintain; they enable them to wallow in their sickness and they consider this the compassionate approach! Of course, in Houston they’re convinced locking them up in prison for 35 years is the compassionate approach!?!

I love you man, unconditionally, really . . . no bullshit; I’m just one of those annoyances . . .

So anyway, I think they’re all a bunch of boofers – to use Judge Kavanaugh’s colorful term. Right, left, what the hell, mate, let’s try middle!?! David Eagleman, the neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has this NeuroLaw Lab; he wants to reform the “criminal justice” system in a manner which reflects our advanced understanding (?) of neuroscience and cognitive science ; he and others have developed these bio-feedback methods for developing the pre-frontal lobes which seem rather promising. I would like to see scientific experiments conducted on the non-violent prison population, involving the bio-feedback methods of Eagleman et. al. in conjunction with the Autism methodology of the Tiller Institute (see also this study from Yale). This, of course, flies in the face of scientific materialism and related dogmas but, like you, integral to my very being is a sense of outlandish optimism, so I sent an email to the Tiller group suggesting this as a submission to NSF IDEA MACHINE. Considering that “unconditional love” is point 500 on David Hawkin’s “map of consciousness” scale, these experiments could be informative with regards to an “analytical understanding of unconditional love.” Of course, in my view as a Buddhist, unconditional love requires wisdom – enlightenment, in that wisdom obtains when one is no longer conditioned . . .

It sounds like the Pareto-Optimal Empathy concept is an effort to establish quantitative connections and relationships within a hierarchical network or system consisting of informational patterns represented by individual beings in which an equilibrium of love or compassion fluctuates, grows and expands dynamically. In the proposed model the development of a)empathy, combined with b)knowledge or understanding along with c)power and the d) desire to improve the well-being of system allows the information network to expand for the purpose of acquiring more resources.

Some thoughts:1) Hierarchy-The hierarchy of information patterns fits Confucian concepts of familial roles and responsibilities. For instance in Confucianism the more experienced and knowledgeable members of the family are in charge, and have the greatest obligations and duties in terms of taking care of the younger, less experienced and more dependent family members. Relatively speaking, they also are afforded the greatest amount of power in order to fulfill their obligations. Whereas the members of the family who are less wise and capable have obligations to follow the older family leaders, and to show filial piety to their elders who protect and care for them. In return, they have less responsibility, but are also provided with fewer resources since the tasks assigned to them are simpler and require less resources to complete. In this system a strong and well defined power structure is important to keeping a stable controlled environment for the family, and can be especially useful when dealing with large, complex social structures and uncertain situations. In this case we can simply substitute information patterns for discrete individuals or beings. The hierarchy is not of indviduals but information patterns which contribute to their information system or network.2) "Having only universal empathy, one could simply stand by and co-experience the world-suffering, even if one had the power to do something about it. Having only the goal of improving the world without an understanding of the world, one will just make a mess, because one will lack a deep resonant connection to the things one is trying to improve. Putting them together, one has the desire to help each of the beings in the world, and the understanding to know what helping each of those beings really means."-Buddhism correlates greater levels of empathy with higher levels of spiritual power. Having compassion and knowledge without power isn't particularly useful, and having power without empathy and knowledge can be dangerous and counterproductive to the goals of the larger system. Beings with less or negative Karma suffer more and have less power. By continually improving one's moral characteristics and compassion for others power and responsibility gradually accumulate, with the ultimate goal of Enlightenment. In most Buddhists traditions followers strive through the process of Samsara to eventually become some sort of Ascendent entity such as a Bodisattvha who assists those here on Earth and relieves their suffering. Examples would be the deity Tara who is said to have meditated for ten million years in order to release tens of millions of beings from suffering, and the Goddess of Mercy Guanyin. At the highest levels in the hierarchy Buddhas take responsibility for other universes and realities.

3)"the goal of maximizing the world's well-being" and "Unconditional love, in this analysis, is basically the maximally ethical behavior according to the "pattern ethics"- In other words, POE posits there might be an Utilitarian foundation underlying the purposes of most or all Sapient entities or information patterns, or perhaps even the Universe itself.

4) "In resource constrained situations...extension of some patterns constrains extension of other patterns" - This concept bears similarities to wave-function collapse, in that the wave represents many positions or possibilities, and in wave-function collapse the selection of one possibility intrinsically excludes the other positions and outcomes from emerging. I suspect large and perhaps theoretically unlimited amount of informational patterns (i.e. Light) routinely converge in one locale in space-time but cannot be expressed simultaneously in a materlal way (quantum "foam" might be an example). -When multiple patterns of higher dimensional information converge into a lower dimension, the geometry cannot hold all the information and it must be decided which information will be transmitted and carried, much the way a transistor or computer memory holds information. Its like taking a computer program which is a 3 dimensional simulation and converting it and rendering it in 2 dimensionally as sprites, or trying to put a three dimensional globe of the world on a flat map. Its meaning will be distorted somewhat but the most important parts of the information will be preserved. The 3 dimensional information can be imitated in a somewhat convincing way, but it is an illusion. An abstraction of something more specific and complex which could not be completely transferred due to simple mathematical geometry. The information is competing to be "remembered" as it crosses dimensional boundaries, since only a finite amount can be carried across in a given context.

-In all likelihood mass is the constraining resource in our particular bubble of fourth dimensional space time. The information fights over the mass the way billions of minute sperm compete over a comparatively massive single egg. In fact, we can see that a sperm and wave of light move actually move in a similar manner. In a vacuum light is perfectly symmetrical and defined mathematically by its frequency and wavelength. A spermatozoa on the other hand is information which is encumbered by mass, and so the wavelength, frequency and direction of the wave becomes entangled with its environment and warped by an unknown quantity of local variables such as gravity, and probably also nonlocal extradimensional variables. Its like a person who is straining to carry a heavy rock. Their gait will become less efficient in that they might stumble around, and they will move more slowly. -Which wave gets the mass? Which sperm gets the egg? Just like the Pareto-Optimum example of the woman who has to choose amongst men, the information with the best combination of empathy and capability of improving outcomes for the neighbors to which it is informationally attached, its "system" or "network".

"A multi-objective optimization problem is the problem of maximizing or minimizing a SET of functions, without necessarily specifying which of the functions is more important than which other one, or placing weights on the functions.... " - These ideas also match the wave, in which the relative importance of various relevant functions and variables have not been established. Until wave-function collapse occurs there's no way for the observer to determine how many variables are involved or which ones are responsible for the collapse.Information is memetic or viral by nature. It seeks self-preservation, replication, and evolution through expressing itself in as many ways and dimensions as possible. Although it seems unlikely that geometric dimensionality is limited to integers, for the sake of simplicity let us say that we are in fourth dimensional space, and the information seeking mass is fifth dimensional. Let us suppose a functional unit of information in five dimensions is lost, for example because other information is deemed more valuable or important to the system or network. If the most important parts of that lost information have been encoded in 4th dimensional mass (memory), then the lost information can be partially recovered and reconstituted or Resurrected. In this way the most valuable information is contintually being encoded to lower dimensions. Transmogrified and recorded, so that it is preserved. In this scenario the most important information is expressed in the lowest dimensions, the dimensions that form the foundation and basis of the higher dimensions. The lowest dimensions are most interconnected in that they overlap and thus wield influence over the higher dimensions. A fourth dimensional entity is composed of and requires first, second, and third dimensional informational geometries in order to exist. So these lowest geometric spaces are the most valuable and coveted by higher dimensional information patterns.

"But for entities that are at most moderately powerful relative to the complexity and diversity of other entities in the universe, empathizing with all other entities in the universe will not be possible. To put it simply: Eventually the brain of the empathizing entity will fill up, and it won’t be able to contain the knowledge needed to effectively empathize with additional entities in a reasonable time-frame." "Finite-resource systems that recognize and create patterns can exercise broad-scope pattern-level love via pattern appreciation and active pattern enhancement, but unconditional pattern-love needs infinite resources."-The limitations of dimensional geometry require that an agent must eventually expand into new geometric spaces and dimensions in order to acquire more resources. There is only so much matter that can be converted and optimized in a closed system. "A missing ingredient in the discussion so far is the possibility for an agent to expand its capacity, so as to be able to empathize with more things (either becoming infinite, or becoming a bigger finite agent)... A finite entity that assimilated enough of the universe's mass-energy could potentially make itself powerful enough to empathize with every other entity in the universe."-This matches Kurzweil's concept of eventually capturing, converting and optimizing all the matter in the universe. Once this goal is completed, there is nothing else to do but seek out resources in other types of dimensional geometries. Possibly other universes or bubbles of space-time which have been tuned differently and thus have different characteristics and informational resources, or other extradimensional spaces which would be revealed by the completion of the optimization process.

Considering the potential risks with the expected entropic, chaotic and emergent behaviors, "unconditional" is a particularly interesting target for optimization. It would be interesting to see how AGI would amend the approach some day... or maybe Dr. Goertzel's upload will continue with rolling releases.

If you want to feel like you have "magical powers" to "bewitch" any man you want and have him falling head over heels in love with you (even if he totally ignores you now) go read what Bob Grant has to say on this page . . .